Movie review: There's not much to slurp up in 'Ramen Heads'

By Al Alexander/For the Patriot Ledger

Friday

Apr 6, 2018 at 3:32 AM

Anyone who ever served time in a college dorm is familiar with ramen noodles, the cheap, easy-to-make sustenance that comes in colorful, appetite-inducing packages. Gourmet soup it’s not. But that’s not the case in Japan, where “the national dish” has been commandeered by artisans inventing ever more bizarre ways to jazz up the ingredients to create the perfect bowl of made-from-scratch ramen soup. It’s a phenomenon that’s caught the attention of Koke Shigeno, a filmmaker who attempts to make a meal out of the craze in his rah-rah documentary “Ramen Heads.”

I assume it was his intent to share his love for ramen with the world, but the final product projects more like a propaganda piece you’d expect from a lobby group like the Iowa Pork Producers Association. In Shigeno’s world, there’s no such thing as a bad cup of ramen. He’s especially smitten with chef Osamu Tomita, winner of the Ramen of the Year award four times running. People line up outside his tiny shop in the Japanese prefecture of Chiba waiting for hours to gobble down his slurp-alicious concoction. But why focus only on him? Either Shigeno is Tomita’s PR director, or he’s a lazy filmmaker disinterested in fully vetting other chefs.

His praise of Tomita is effusive, as he follows his subject around like a love-starved puppy, showing us every boring step of how his hero drops such disgusting things as pig heads, sardines and anchovies into his boiling kettles of what looks like thick, muddy water. He boils the goop for days; right up until “the precise moment” he’s ready to blend his arsenal of witch brews into one pot for the final product. Consider yourself lucky you don’t have to smell it (I can only imagine!), or taste it, because it looks far from enticing.

This goes on for something like a third of the movie’s 93-minute runtime, interrupted intermittently by Shigeno’s fawning remarks. Only when he runs out of praise for Tomita does Shigeno move on, providing brief (like a minute or 2) look-ins at other top-notch ramen chefs in the land of the rising sun. Then, it’s back to Tomita, showing us how he spends his days off, wearing designer clothes and going around sampling the competition. And when Shigeno finally gets tired of that -- and can’t possibly think of anything else to tell us about ramen -- he barges into Tomita’s home to show us what life’s like with the chef’s wife and three small children. What this has to do with ramen -- other than padding a movie weak on material -- is anyone’s guess. At least it’s more interesting than his brief, animated history of ramen; or his visit to the national ramen cook-off.

Normally, I’d say, at least we have the delicious-looking food to salivate over; but we don’t even get that, as Shigeno repeatedly pokes his camera in the face of some of the most repulsive-looking chow I’ve seen. But don’t tell that to his Japanese fans, or Ramen Heads, as he refers to them in a play on the more familiar Parrot Head and Dead Head monikers. They gobble this stuff up as fast as they can dig their chopsticks into it. I guess it’s an acquired taste. But I’ll pass, hoping it’s one Japanese craze that never makes it off the island.